At a lunch meeting, I made a presentation to the faculty and
administration today about blogging, along with my colleague Eric
Behrens. I wish there had been more time for discussion and questions: some
interesting things came up after the meeting had broken up. (Eric has set up
a
comments thread at his blog for any Swarthmore attendees who have questions
or comments on the presentation.)

I said I write essays for several online publications for five
reasons:

1) Because I
want to introduce some unexpected influences and ideas into my intellectual
and academic work. I want to unsettle the overly domesticated, often hermetic
thinking that comes with academic specialization. I want to introduce a “mutational
vector” into my scholarly and intellectual work.
2) Because I want a place to publish small writings, odd writings, leftover
writings, lazy speculations, half-formed hypotheses. I want a place to publish
all the things that I think have some value but not enough to constitute legitimate
scholarship. I want a chance to branch into new areas of specialization at
a reduced level of intensity and seriousness.
3) Because I want to find out how much of my scholarly work is usefully translatable
into a wider public conversation. A lot of my writings on Iraq, for example,
are really a public working-out of more scholarly writing I’m doing
in my current monograph, a translation of my academic engagement with the
historiography of imperialism.
4) Because I want to model for myself and others how we should all behave
within an idealized democratic public sphere. I want to figure out how to
behave responsibly but also generatively, how to rise to the better angels
of my communicative nature.
5) Because I’m a compulsive loudmouth.

After listening, one of my colleagues asked a question that’s
fairly typical and yet it really made me think once again about some perennial
questions. She wondered if any of this blogging stuff leads to real, human connections.

Well, sure it does, I replied. I observed that I had just recently
had a chance to
meet John Holbo in real life, to our mutual delight. I’d met up with
some of my Cliopatria colleagues
at the American Historical Association. (The online reporting of both encounters
largely seemed to lead to the dissing of my beard, though. Geez.) And I feel
I’ve made real, powerful, emotionally resonant connections with other
online correspondents over the years, even if we haven’t met face-to-face.

I thought about it some later. It’s also true that a lot
of my online work is about a more abstract sense of human connection through
an impersonal public sphere. That’s no different than scholarship..We
know some of our colleagues in our disciplinary speciality very well—often
people of our same generational cohort. Others exist as nothing more than fellow
professionals, whom you know through their writing and maybe a bit of gossip
here and there. So blogging is not exactly radically different than any writing
in that way, including scholarly writing.

On the other hand, my blog writing does feel surreal to me sometimes.
It involves me in a discursive world that sometimes feels like a small town
where everyone knows one another. Kieran knows Harry who knows Russell who knows
Laura who knows Rana who knows Elizabeth who knows John. They all know me, or
at least the highly public, constrained, particular reduction of me who manifests
in my online voice.

There’s a circle of people reading and writing about each
others blogs and so much of what they have to say influences my waking thoughts.
I crave their approval and respect. But at the same time, so little of that
conversation comes into explicit ways into my day-to-day professional life or
my personal life. I can come home and say, “You’ll never believe
what that Belle Waring
had to say today!”, but it takes so much set-up to stop the flow of an
always-moving discussion and explain it to my wife that it’s not really
worth the effort. I can say to a colleague, “I think you’ll really
like what
Russell Arben Fox had to say recently”, but I always feel vaguely
embarrassed when I do, because I don’t know what they’ll think if
they do go and look—will it take too much prior experience of ongoing
discussions to appreciate it? will they wish I hadn't wasted their time on something
that they couldn't immediately cite and make 'normal' scholarly use out of?—and
because I feel a little like the guy who goes to lectures by engineers and tries
to tell them about his perpetual motion machine. Sometimes it’s like being
under the spell of some alien intelligence, on the other side of an ethnographic
divide, a native mumbling to the patient, civilized researcher about the inexpressible
interior feeling of his own culture.

One of my Cliopatria colleagues observed in Seattle that he
was glad to see I can say funny things now and again and I thought, not for
the first time, about just how truncated and selective that public voice of
mine is. I might occasionally drop into pure humor, but mostly I’m trying
so hard to be respectable and fair and ethical that I don’t feel I can
be humorous. There’s no way to convey the tone of warmth and gentle self-deprecation
that makes a joke in my real life funny: online it feels just snarky and unfair
to its target, unthoughtful. Of course, I also don’t talk about my strong
feelings on many subjects, because I don’t feel they have a proper place
when I’m trying to be judicious and show fairness and have some intellectual
heft.

This bleeds over
into other things. I don’t generally like to talk about my everyday life
or feelings in the blog. I think to myself, why would anyone care? To be completely
honest, I don’t always care when reading blogs that about other people’s
personal troubles and tribulations. It’s a bit like when I’m playing
a massively-multiplayer computer game and some other character in my party stops
to say that he needs to take a break because he’s got diarrhea. Too much
information! Too much information! Keep the fleshworld out of my pure cyberworld,
man. Still, other times, I really want to know and help and feel: it’s
part of the pluralism of the online environment, that there’s a space
for diaries and essayists and everything in between. Sometimes I’m looking
for that. Other times, someone has given me so much of intellectual value at
some moments that I want to repay them by reading along sympathetically while
they talk about their divorce or their engagement or their depression or their
sex lives.

Even that’s
one of the issues here: online discourse, whether you come to it for an exploration
of personal lives and feelings or a pure Habermasian public sphere, is experienced
in staccato, in fragments. It doesn’t have the experiential cohesiveness
of reading a novel or a letter. It doesn’t have the temporal situatedness
(and inescapable tangibility) of everyday real-world life. I can come and go
in both the thoughts and lives of others as I please with no one the wiser.

As I started on this essay after lunch, I decided to go look
at Justin Hall’s website, links.net,
which I catch up with every once in a while. Justin had a significant impact
on me when I was just starting here as a faculty member: I was both excited
and repelled by the online presence he’d crafted. It was so suggestive
of the possibilities of online work, both technological and communicative, but
he was doing exactly what I wouldn’t ever want to do personally, and that’s
use the web for a kind of performance art, a lengthy form of written self-exploration
and self-revelation. I had not even the faintest interest in writing about what
he wrote about: his sex life, his personal relationships, his spirituality.
In his hands, it was fascinating, important, useful—and helped me define
the opposite online aspirations I have, to be the respectable, restrained, fair-minded
intellectual trying to work within a highly idealized public sphere.

I catch up with Justin’s site every few months, occasionally
pop into his comments threads. Sometimes I don’t read it very carefully,
sometimes he’s writing about something I find really interesting. Sometimes
it seems like schtick, other times affectingly genuine. I like him as a person:
it’s a way of keeping tabs on him. Lately we’ve run into each other
playing City of Heroes and World of Warcraft, which is both cool and vaguely
unnerving. I mean, here I am a level 50+ character on World of Warcraft and
all, he can do the math and know that means that two hours a night or more have
been given up to the game in the last month. A little intimacy surrendered at
that moment, and yet, there’s so much to talk about with him. My gameplaying
is always half academicized anyway, always grist for some genuine (I think)
intellectual mill. So a few nights back, he pops up, we talk about the issues,
I bounce some ideas for an upcoming Terra
Nova essay off of him while my character creeps around some dripping cave
inhabited by alien insects.

I have no idea that about a week before we’re meeting
up in World of Warcraft, he’s gone and posted this
video, and then suspended his work at links.net. So today I view the video
in various stages of dismay and concern. I see that it's actually been discussed
in all sorts of places, including Grand
Text Auto, a site I really like. I’m thinking, if my online connections
were real ones, I’d know this already. Hell, if I were half the online
reader I'm supposed to be, I'd know it. I wouldn’t have been
chatting with him about virtual worlds, but asking him how he’s doing
and if everything’s ok. But you watch the video and you realize that it’s
both genuine and performative, self-indulgent and heartfelt, a plea for connection
and a manipulation of the idea of connection, authentic and pretentious as all
hell. Like links.net itself has always been. Which is exactly what Justin is
grappling with: he is now, like all artists and public figures, a prisoner of
his art. Justin Hall now has to live with his doppleganger: “Justin Hall”,
the stick figure he made out of hundreds of thousands of words published online
over eleven years.

Whom is it that
I know and care about? I think it’s Justin Hall, but mostly I hear about
him through “Justin Hall”. Because it’s “Justin Hall”,
I’m fine with forgetting about him for months on end. But maybe it’s
a mistake to attribute that to blogging or online discourse. I’m not really
a very attentive friend in general. If people are out of sight, they’re
out of mind. Not because I don’t care. The title of this blog was chosen
very deliberately and expressively. My intellectual persona here is indeed easily
distracted, but so am I in everyday emotional life. I forget stuff and people
and obligations all the time, with (I hope, I feel, I pray) no malice, but just
because something has caught my eye and I’m deep in the coils of my own
mind for a while, behind a wall of mist.

Again, it’s not really different than any kind of writing
or art or public life. It’s all about the formation of a double consciousness,
the productive disconnect of an interior, inexpressive self from a speaking
self. I like it that way. I believe in a kind of decorum and formality in the
public sphere; I believe in the public sphere as a democratic and thus somewhat
impersonal ideal, the meaningful incarnation and structural guarantee of freedom
all at once.

Real human as well as valuably professional connections do come
to you from what you write, whether it’s a peer-reviewed scholarly article
in a well-respected journal or a blog entry. The connections that come to you
through blogging are more unanticipated, less domesticated, but as I said to
my colleagues today, that’s the point. I do worry sometimes, as Justin
worries, that what makes it all valuable and generative also increasingly afflicts
me in a real, lived, everyday context with intellectual and emotional aphasia,
that I am constantly transformed and affected by relationships with are entirely
in my own head as far as everyone around me is concerned. It’s kind of
like being the tree falling in the forest with no one around. Damn right I make
a sound! I think.